Discussion and Conclusions. Many countries have witnessed shifts in academic appointments such as a shift from many permanent positions for university researchers to a larger share of contingent, temporary positions, which has affected the employment conditions in academia (▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ & ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, 2006, p 323-325). The Netherlands is no exception to this trend. Fitting with this trend of more contingent careers is the shift from employed to student PhD candidates, which has taken place in several countries. Although in the Netherlands, at the time of the survey, universities had to employ PhD candidates financed through their own funds, there were also many PhD candidates who were not employed by the university, such as scholarship PhD candidates and PhD candidates doing a PhD next to a main job. Our results show that type of appointment does not significantly influence the immaterial infrastructure of PhD candidates (supervision), but does strongly negatively affect material infrastructure (financial situation and office facilities). Considering the fact that most of the externals in our sample are funded through scholarships and not through other employment, it is likely that these are PhD candidates who work full-time on their PhD. In this light, it is especially remarkable that many important aspects of research infrastructure are not available to so many of them.7 In addition, externals who do have access to at least some office facilities, are less satisfied with them. Economic psychology shows job satisfaction of individuals to be related to expectations (▇▇▇▇▇, 2010) and to be affected by comparisons to others (▇▇▇▇▇ & ▇▇▇▇▇▇, 1996). Quite probably, the lower satisfaction of externals is at least partly due to the fact that they compare their situation to that of internals, which is objectively better. In this light, it would be interesting to study additional aspects of job satisfaction, such as with remuneration and embeddedness in the department. Our results also show that externals are stressed at work more often than internals. An interesting follow-up question would be to see if their higher stress levels could be caused by the lesser availability of material infrastructure, or are caused by other factors. Another striking finding in our study was that female PhD candidates were more likely to report high work pressure than male PhD candidates. Again, a follow-up question that warrants further investigation but cannot be answered by a survey study like ours, is to investigate the reasons for the higher work pressure experienced by females. Of course, our conclusions are based on data from a single university only. However, the PhD candidate population in Leiden does not differ from that in the other Dutch universities: everywhere a considerable share of PhD candidates is university employee but there are also many external PhD candidates. Local conditions for PhDs may vary somewhat because of policy differences, but our findings are quite comparable to what PhDs from other universities report in national meetings. Consequently, by and large our results are quite likely to represent the situation of PhD candidates in all Dutch universities. 7 In 2015, two years after the ▇▇▇ survey on which the findings of our paper are based, several questions especially directed at PhD candidates were included in the university’s employee monitor. The results of this monitor show that satisfaction with office facilities did not differ between internal and external PhDs (▇▇▇▇▇▇ & ▇▇▇▇▇▇, 2015), which suggests that office facilities have indeed improved for externals. However, no questions were included on the availability of office facilities, categories of internals and externals were slightly different and no distribution of the data was shown, making it difficult to compare results between our survey and the employee monitor. In conclusion, on the whole, the surveyed PhD candidates are quite satisfied with their PhD experience. Strikingly, however, PhD candidates who are not employed by the university are at a disadvantaged position with respect to financial situation, offered facilities, and experienced work stress. Hence, type of appointment affects several aspects of the PhD. This shows that precarious working conditions influence the way PhD candidates conduct their research projects.
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